Oracle Debuts Exabyte Storage System

May 2011

Oracle has introduced the StorageTek T10000C tape drive, the industry’s fastest and highest-capacity tape drive, with a world-record capacity of 5 TB per cartridge and an industry-leading 240 MB/sec data transfer rate. When the tape drive is combined with the StorageTek SL8500 modular library system, a single Oracle tape library can now house more than an exabyte of data and offers cost savings of as much as 23 percent over five years compared to other tape vendors.

The speed and capacity of this new storage solution is designed to make massive amounts of archived data available to applications, while requiring minimal data center floor space. Industries such as healthcare, media and entertainment, and biomedical research are expected to be some of the primary beneficiaries of this new technology.

“The release of the StorageTek T10000C tape drive reaffirms Oracle’s undisputed leadership in tape technology,” says James Cates, vice president of hardware development at Oracle. “The StorageTek T10000C sets the new standard in tape by storing more than three times more data on a single cartridge than any other tape drive. Combining it with the StorageTek SL3000 and SL8500 modular library systems helps ensure that customers, regardless of size, can afford to retain critical data without concern for future scalability.”

Now that applications are generating and utilizing greater amounts of data, tape drive performance has become a critical factor in generating backups within an allotted time window. The lightning-fast data throughput of the StorageTek T10000C tape drive speeds the backup window and also leads to reduced power consumption because less power is required to write the same amount of data.

Tape solutions are a cost-effective way for customers to back up large datasources and maintain copies of infrequently used data. The StorageTek T10000C tape drive is part of Oracle’s tiered storage approach, which incorporates the advantages of both disk and tape and balances the cost of different types of storage media against application performance requirements.